Gordon Monro's blog

Phenomenology Rules

2009-10-14T09:24:00.007+11:00

(Long post)

At the beginning of October I went to a three-day conference in Melbourne called "Time, Transcendence, Performance". Not something that I would normally do, but my installation Cloud Drum was in the art show associated with the event. All the works dealt with some mixture of time and performance in some way, and since mine involves two time scales and is interactive it fitted in quite well.

The conference was organised by Stuart Grant, Jodie McNeilly and Caroline Vains, assisted by lots of people; Jeff Stewart looked after the art show, among other things. The conference took place at three locations: Monash University's Caulfield campus, Dancehouse in Carlton, and ACMI at Federation Square. There were also events in Second Life. At times it seemed that threre were three or four separate conferences going on, and I missed out on all the Federation Square events, including Stelarc's opening talk. Also at Caulfield there were multiple parallel sessions, so I only saw a fraction of the conference. It was certainly a large and complex event, with a sizeable international participation. Of the parts I saw, although the tight schedule became a bit frayed at times, as far as I can tell things ran pretty well.

I don't think I have met a card-carrying phenomenologist before, but there were quite a few around the conference. It was pretty clear that "time" in the conference title didn't have a lot to do with physics, but rather with personal experience. Heidegger and especially Husserl came up repeatedly. (I realise that there is an argument that time as conceived by physicists can be derived from phenomenology, but I don't know how it goes.) There is a whole language here that I don't speak - this is not a criticism, just a comment - so quite a few of the presentations went over my head. There was a sub-theme of comments on intense experience, described by one speaker as "moments of stillness".

As well as theory, there was practice. The main performing artform people were concerned with seemed to be dance, and there were performances at Dancehouse, some quite striking, in the evenings. I'll just mention "Zeno's Overcoat", performed by Peter Fraser (dancer) and Dale Gorfinkel (musician). There were also two talks I attended where the speakers described their personal experiences very vividly. One was by Ian Maxwell (Sydney), describing his baptism into the Greek Orthodox Church, which came about because he wished to marry a Greek woman; the other was the last paper of the conference, given by Alphonso Lingis (U.S.A), which consisted of a series of vignettes of various experiences he has had over the years, with appropriate music. Although both of these people were talking about specific experiences, they somehow managed to give them a universal character.

I'm not sure what I've taken away from the conference, though I found it enjoyable, and there were lots of interesting things. There is a whole world of phenomenology, it seems. Indeed, I did have a sense to some extent of two parallel worlds, with phenomenologists occupying one and cognitive scientists (who were not represented here) the other. From what I can work out, the phenomenologists opened up these questions first, but a lot has happened since. This isn't a criticism of Stuart Grant, as the conference already had an impressively wide scope. Also, I understand he has plans for bringing together phenomenologists and cognitive scientists at some time.

The conference also pointed out to me a specific difference between the humanities and the sciences. I saw somewhere (I don't remember where) a comment that in science, successful work becomes anonymous, in that it is absorbed into textbooks and nobody except the odd historian feels the need to go back to the original writings. This certainly fits in with my past experience in science. The conference was on the humanities; there were constant references back to the writings of Heidegger and Husserl, and other originary thinkers. Also, the history of science is a small sub-discipline, whereas it seems that many (most?) humanities scholars are part-time historians of their disciplines. Again, a Mathematics department is full of mathematicians; the parallel would be an English department full of novelists or poets. Not only is the history of science not much practised in science departments, but criticism or analysis as understood in the humanities is not much practised either. This isn't a question of wilful blindess; it must be a consequence of the different ways knowledge or understanding is secured in the different disciplines.

I'm not gong to rush in any further where angels fear to tread.

St Patrick's College Art Exhibition

2009-09-21T15:18:00.010+10:00

I recently entered my piece Exiguous Cubes in the St Patrick's College Art Exhibition, Ballarat. This was the first time I have entered a general art competition of this sort, and it was also the first public outing for Exiguous Cubes as a whole. To my surprise (I wasn't told in advance) I won the University of Ballarat Emerging Artist Prize. The main prize, the Flanagan Award, was won by Carole Wilson's collage work Survey Vessel 2. The judge was Gordon Morrison, Director of the Art Gallery of Ballarat.

Most of the 84 works on display were two-dimensional: largely paintings, drawings or mixed media; there were some photographs and some 2D works involving digital manipulation. There were a number of sculptures and ceramic works. Mine was the only computer-based work, and there were no video pieces, though video works were mentioned in the call for entries. I'm not yet familiar enough with the scene to recognise a lot of the artists' names, but there seemed to be some people with fairly high profiles there, winners of Australia Council residencies and the like.

As a visual artist I am "emerging" according to the conditions of the exhibition. Since I started so late in visual art I am grateful to the organisers for not setting an age limit. Once I heard an artist talk entitled "Have I emerged yet?", but it will be a little while before I have to worry about that.

"Ab Initio" exhibition in Ballarat

2009-08-17T17:50:00.029+10:00

I will be having an exhibition entitled "Ab Initio" as part of the Ballarat Foto Bienniale Fringe exhibition program. It is of digital prints related to my installation Cloud Drum, and generated from scratch in my computer. So they are not photographs at all, but they have been accepted for the Fringe.

My exhibition

Exhibition: Friday 4th September to Monday 5th October
Opening: Friday 4th September, 5.30pm.
Location: Radmac Gallery, 104 Armstrong Street (North), Ballarat VIC 3350.
Gallery hours: Mon-Fri 8.30am-5.30pm, Sat 9am-12 noon.

Radmac Gallery (which is also an art supply shop) is venue 26 on the map here. The gallery is a short walk from Ballarat railway station. Scrolling the map down will show, among other things, more than a dozen vineyards in the area.

The Ballarat Foto Bienniale

The Foto Bienniale, which runs throughout September, promises to be huge, with a Core of over 20 invited exhibitions, a considerably greater number of Fringe exhibitions, and various seminars and artist talks. The exhibitors include overseas and interstate people together with locals. Most events and exhibitions are free; they are mostly in Ballarat, but some are in Daylesford and other towns. Details at http://www.ballaratfoto.org.

"Biotope" photo

2009-08-10T15:27:00.010+10:00

Here is a photo of my video Drum Mask playing on an external screen at Cube 37, Frankston Arts Centre, Melbourne.

Image courtesy of Jon McCormack

The video was also playing on an even bigger screen round the corner - the biggest screen I have ever seen my work on. This was part of the "Biotope" event showing works from the Centre for Electronic Media Art, Monash University.

"Biotope" at Cube 37, Frankston

2009-07-30T20:51:00.001+10:00

Currently Cube 37, the large street display at the Frankston Arts Centre, is showing works from the Centre for Electronic Media Art at Monash University, including my new video Drum Mask.

A lot of the people involved have been out of town, so there will be a "closing" rather than an opening on Thursday 6th August.

"Opening": Thursday 6th August 6.30pm.
Frankston Arts Centre (Cube 37)
37 Davey St, Frankston VIC 3199

Works will continue to be shown until 9th August.

http://artscentre.frankston.vic.gov.au/

Back from Schloss Dagstuhl

2009-07-30T12:34:00.005+10:00

I am still trying to assimilate the seminar on "Computational Creativity" at Schloss Dagstuhl.

The old buildings at Schloss Dagstuhl

There were two notable computer art pioneers present, Harold Cohen (San Diego) and Frieder Nake (Bremen); also the well-known philosopher Margaret Boden (Sussex), and quite a range of people who are predominantly computer scientists working on various ways that computers might behave creatively or generate output that we may consider "creative". A lot of them were also artists or musicians, and two informal concerts (one acoustic, one electronic and audio-visual) were organised during the seminar.

I have read papers by quite a few of the people there, and it was good to meet them in person. Unfortunately I came down with laryngitis, and could only whisper the whole time I was there. Nonetheless it was a great event to be part of, and it will undoubtedly influence my future work.

Schloss Dagstuhl

2009-07-03T15:50:00.003+10:00

I'm off to Germany soon for a seminar on "Computational Creativity" at Schloss Dagstuhl in Saarland, Germany. Schloss Dagstuhl is a conference centre set up to hold conferences in computer science, though this particular conference crosses over into the arts and philosophy. The topics up for discussion centre around creative behaviour in artificial systems; the systems may operate autonomously or with guidance or collaboration from a human artist. A particular focus is on systems that are modelled on evolution in nature, and there is already quite a long history of "artificial life art", surveyed in the book "Metacreation" by Mitchell Whitelaw. There is also quite a long history of computer programs that can improvise music in concert with other (human) musicians.

The seminar is shaping up to be pretty exciting, and some well-known people will be there. The web page for the seminar is here.

Galanter's complexist manifesto

2009-06-21T21:08:00.014+10:00

I recently came across an article by the generative artist, writer and academic Philip Galanter: an admittedly manifesto-like piece in which he proposes what he calls "Complexism - a new science-friendly paradigm for the arts and humanities".

Galanter discusses modernism and postmodernism in the context of complexity theory from science. He sees post-modernism as offering a corrective to some of the unfortunate aspects of modernism, but now post-modernism has fallen has fallen victim to its own problems. Galanter's Complexism is intended to reconcile the two via the theory and practice of complex systems, and he presents the following table:

Modernism	Postmodernism	Complexism
Progress	Circulation	Emergence and Co-evolution
Fixed	Random	Chaotic
The Author	The Text	The Generative Process
Authority	Contention	Feedback
Truth	No Truth	Incomplete truth known to be not fully provable
Pro Formalism	Anti Formalism	Form as public process not privilege
Hierarchy	Collapse	Connectionist networks

There is a lot to be unpacked here. Galanter expands on the table in the 20 pages of the article, which is online at http://philipgalanter.com/downloads/complexism_chapter.pdf. He has also started a blog in which he intends to further develop these ideas, at http://www.philipgalanter.com/complexism/index.html.

I am certainly pleased to see work like this proceeding beyond the now sterile debate of modernism versus postmodernism, and especially work that deals seriously with some of the extraordinary advances in scientific thinking of the last half-century or more.

Art Incorporated

2009-05-06T10:33:00.003+10:00

I have been reading a small book by Julian Stallabrass, who lectures at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. The edition that I have is entitled Contemporary Art: A Very Short Introduction, (one of a series of Very Short Introductions from Oxford University Press) but it was first published in 2004 under the title Art Incorporated, which better reflects its contents. The book discusses the period 1989 to about 2002, covering the collapse of the Communist states in Eastern Europe and the emergence of the U.S. as the sole superpower, the stockmarket crash of the late 1980s, the boom in the 1990s and the dot-com crash of 2000. The book contains a sustained discussion of the relationship of the art world to globalisation, neoliberal ideology, rampant capitalism and consumerism, with reference to a substantial number of individual artists and artworks.

A few quotes from the book:

"Art prices and the volume of art sales tend to match the stock markets closely, and it is no accident that the world's major financial centres are also the principal centres for the sale of art."

"Corporate culture has thoroughly assimilated the discourse of a tamed post-modernism. As in mass culture, art's very lack of convention has become entirely conventional."

And, even more strongly:
"The daring novelty of free art - in its continual breaking with conventions - is only a pale rendition of the continual evaporation of certainties produced by capital itself, which tears up all resistance to the unrestricted flow across the globe of funds, data, products, and finally the bodies of millions of migrants."

In the context of the proliferation of bienniales in the 1990s:
''Just as business executives circled the earth in search of new markets, so a breed of nomadic global curators began to do the same, shuttling from one bienniale or transnational art event to another ..."

"[A bienniale] performs the same function for a city ... as a Picasso above the fireplace does for a tobacco executive."

In discussing an exhibition of Chinese art in Hong Kong in the context of globalisation, making the point that the welcome for "exotic" artists in the international art scene is very selective:
"... such works [in more traditional Communist and realist styles] were genuinely different from Western productions and therefore invisible to the global art system".

And a rather depressing conclusion:
"To break with the autonomy of free art is to remove one of the masks of free trade. Or, to put it the other way round, if free trade is to be abandoned as a model for global development, so must its ally, free art."

Despite the conclusion, I found the book refreshing!

"Silence Sound" at Frankston Arts Centre

2009-04-28T20:44:00.002+10:00

There is a big group exhibition coming up at the Frankston Arts Centre under the name "Silence Sound". My video Triangular Vibrations is included.

Opening: Thursday 30th April 6pm.
Frankston Arts Centre (Cube 37)
37 Davey St, Frankston VIC 3199

Exhibition: 28th April - 23rd May.

http://artscentre.frankston.vic.gov.au/

Visual Music Marathon reprise

2009-03-20T16:41:00.002+11:00

In 2007 Dennis Miller organised a Visual Music Marathon in Boston as part of the Boston Cyberarts Festival. Now the whole Marathon is on again in New York, at the Visual Arts Theatre, 333 West 23rd Street, New York City, on April 11th, 2009, form 10am to 10pm. My piece Dissonant Particles is included, in the first hour. Details of the Marathon are at http://www.2009vmm.neu.edu/.

The Victorian bushfires

2009-03-16T17:22:00.004+11:00

The Victorian bushfire emergency is finally over, more than a month after what is now called "Black Saturday", 7th February. Some fires are still burning, but are "contained" (burning within a perimeter).

Over 200 people killed, around 2000 homes destroyed - Australia's worst natural disaster. It led to extraordinary outpourings of generosity, and the State Government has set up a Bushfire Reconstruction Authority, headed by the just-retired Police Commissioner Christine Nixon. It has also set up a Royal Commission, with very wide terms of reference: "courageous", as Sir Humphrey would say; good to see a Government not trying to control the outcome of an inquiry in advance.

Several people have asked me if we were affected. Fortunately, not. There were only minor fires near Ballarat. The nearest sizeable fire was near Daylesford, about 35 km to the north, as the crow flies (or the bushfire travels). Also, we are near the centre of town, though being in a town doesn't necessarily provide protection in extreme conditions - 50 or more houses were destroyed in Bendigo, a town similar in size to Ballarat and about 100 km north. I remember walking through whole suburbs of Hobart that were wiped out in the fires there in 1967, when about 60 people were killed.

There were a couple of days when we decided not to go anywhere, because of road closures around Daylesford and Trentham, and the generally threatening conditions. On Saturday 7th, Ballarat had its all-time record maximum temperature of 44 degrees (111 degrees Fahrenheit), and this was cooler than much of the State - Melbourne reached 46.4.

The most destructive fires were apparently in the Mountain Ash forests. One writer said that these forests are usually wet, and will only burn after a long drought and in extreme conditions. Then they burn with extreme ferocity. The usual advice about defending one's home, if sufficiently prepared, simply didn't work for Black Saturday.

Book on Australian experimental music

2008-12-30T15:19:00.003+11:00

A book about Australian experimental music, Experimental Music: Audio Explorations in Australia (UNSW Press) has just appeared. It is edited by Gail Priest and has chapters by quite a few well-known names in the Australian experimental music scene. On the whole the book focuses on the last 10-15 years, though events from as early as the 1970s are mentioned. The accompanying CD has tracks from as far back as 1971 and as recent as 2007. My piece Peer Pressure (2001) is included.

Gail has also started up www.experimentalmusicaustralia.net, a website related to the book. It contains a growing list of Australian experimental musicians. People are invited to submit themselves for consideration.

Show and Tell at Monash

2008-12-21T22:26:00.006+11:00

On 10th and 11th December the Fine Art Department at Monash University organised a postgraduate colloquium, a sort of big show-and-tell. It wasn't a public exhibition, but each student had some space to set up work and we each got a slot to talk about what we had done, and answer questions in a discussion led by a staff member. About 50 students were involved, so there were typically three or four parallel sessions.

We also had two lectures by Professor Andrew Benjamin, who has the title of Professor of Critical Theory and Philosophical Aesthetics at Monash. Professor Benjamin then attended quite a few of the student presentations, including mine, and asked probing questions.

The whole event was a great success, and an excellent way both to get feedback on one's own work and to find out what other students were up to over a wide range of practices: painting, drawing, sculpture, digital imagery, video and various types of installation. This is the first time the colloquium has been held; I hope it becomes a regular event.

Picture of Exiguous Cube

2008-11-27T21:51:00.004+11:00

Here is a picture of my Exiguous Cube in the Monash Uni Faculty Gallery.

Exhibition: 30x30x30

2008-11-20T09:25:00.003+11:00

I have a piece called Exiguous Cube in the 30x30x30 Exhibition
at the Faculty Gallery, Monash University, Caulfield, Melbourne.

When: Opening Fri 21st November, 5-7pm.
Exhibition 21st Nov - 5th Dec
Where: Faculty Gallery, ground floor Building G, Monash University Caulfield Campus (opposite Caulfield Station)
What: The exhibition is for works that are no bigger than 30x30 cm or 30x30x30 cm, from staff and students in the Faculty of Art and Design, Monash University.

My piece is made out of Lego bricks.

To make an Exiguous Cube in two steps:

Step 1: Add bricks. Place 2 x 4 Lego bricks at random in a 29cm x 29cm x 29cm cube, until no more will fit.

Step 2: Remove bricks. Choose a brick at random. Apply a test: the brick passes the test if it can be removed while leaving the eight corner blocks connected to one another. If the brick passes the test, remove it. Continue choosing bricks at random and applying the test until no more bricks can be removed.

The result is an Exiguous Cube: all the eight corner bricks are connected to one another, but if any brick is removed, the corner blocks won’t all be connected to one another by continuous chains of Lego bricks.

I wrote a computer program to carry out steps 1 and 2, and then built the structure produced by my program.

A censored Internet

2008-11-17T18:25:00.004+11:00

The Australian Federal Government is planning to censor the whole of the Internet. This is not just about providing a "child-safe" version of the Internet; that is only part of the plan.

The other, and really objectionable, part is to censor the Internet for everyone, by requiring all Australian Internet Service Providers to block sites on a secret Government blacklist. The Government is also trialling "dynamic" filtering, which attempts to block sites on-the-fly on the basis of content.

As has been pointed out, this will do nothing to block pornographers, who have plenty of ways of evading filters. What it will do is:

Slow down the Internet and make it more expensive for everyone. (Of course it is already slow and expensive compared to what is available in other advanced countries.)
Block at least 1% of sites that have nothing objectionable, because the filtering software got it wrong. (1% is the lowest figure in the trial referred to below.)
Give the Government extraordinary power to control what we can view.
Give the Government the ability to read our bank information and the like, as the https protocol can be read by filtering software.
Possibly give the Government power to censor email as well as websites, as one of the filters trialled by the Government has this ability.

Despite Government denials, this looks like the Great Firewall of Australia to me, and to a lot of other people.

For more information:

http://nocleanfeed.com/ - lots of links to further information, and suggestions on action to take.

http://www.acma.gov.au/webwr/_assets/main/lib310554/isp-level_internet_content_filtering_trial-report.pdf - the Government report on the filtering trial in Tasmania.

A sonic history of computing

2008-10-27T17:22:00.004+11:00

I have been reading the book The Language of New Media by Lev Manovich (MIT Press, 2001). In the early part of the book, Manovich has some scattered comments about the history of computing, and he tries very hard to find connections with visual media.

Of course Manovich refers to the punched cards used to control the Jacquard loom, which is certainly a connection with visual media. But he goes on to discuss Turing's abstract machines, and to say: "[a Turing machine's] diagram looks suspiciously like a film projector. Is this a coincidence?" Manovich then discusses Conrad Zuse's use of old cinema film to make punched tape to control his machine. Manovich's two examples of computing machines in these comments are Babbage's Analytical Engine, which was never built, and Zuse's machines, which as far as I know had minimal influence on subsequent developments. Von Neumann misses out completely.

(And, by the way, I don't think Turing's original paper had a diagram. The paper is "On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem", Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, Ser. 2, Vol. 42, 1937. There is what I believe to be a photographic reproduction of it in the book The Undecidable, ed. Martin Davis, Raven Press, Hewlett, NY, 1965. There is no diagram in this reproduction.)

Let me make a case along Manovich’s lines for the importance of sound culture in the history of computing.

In functionality the tape part of Turing’s abstract machine is like an audio tape recorder; is this a coincidence? The BBC began using audio recorders in 1932; they used a steel tape. Turing submitted his paper in 1936.

The modern stored-program digital computer originated from several lines of investigation in the period 1937–1950. The first design that fully implemented the features of modern machines was EDVAC (initial design 1945, came into operation in 1951); this machine was far more important for subsequent developments than any of the examples Manovich refers to. The design used magnetic wire for input and output, a system based on audio magnetic wire recorders. For memory it used a mercury acoustic delay line, where data was stored in the form of sound pulses circulating in a tube of mercury.

Thus sound culture could be said to play an important part in the history of computing. Of course this has no more validity than Manovich’s statements about visual culture and computing.

"Undue Noise" in Castlemaine

2008-09-16T18:15:00.001+10:00

This Saturday (20th September) I will be playing audio-visual pieces (mostly live) at a gig called Undue Noise in Castlemaine.

Where: ICU, 1 Halford St, Castlemaine, Victoria.
When: Saturday 20th September, 8pm.
How much: Sorry - I don't know. But it won't be a lot.

Undue Noise is a series organised on behalf of experimental sound and video artists in central Victoria. It takes place at venues in Bendigo and Castlemaine.

More info: http://undue.cajid.com/ or http://www.myspace.com/bendigounduenoise.

Trocadero - Followup

2008-08-26T18:13:00.004+10:00

There is to be a massive group exhibition, "Wallpaper 08", at Trocadero Art Space. For me this is a follow-on from my exhibition there in August, as I will be showing some new high-resolution prints generated by the program I wrote for Cloud Drum.

The exhibition dates are 10-27 September, and the address is Level 1, 119 Hopkins St, Footscray, Melbourne (near Footscray station).

Later: My contribution is six new images from Cloud Drum. There are something like 50 artists involved in this show. When I put my works up, about half of the artists had installed their contributions. It should be a pretty amazing show. The opening is on Saturday 13th September, 4-6pm.

Exibition at Trocadero Art Space

2008-07-25T10:14:00.005+10:00

My installation Cloud Drum will be at Trocadero Art Space in Footscray, Melbourne, 30th July to 16th August. My piece is in Gallery 2.

Address: Level 1, 119 Hopkins St, Footscray.
It is a short walk from Footscray railway station.

Gallery hours: The gallery is open Wed - Sat, 11am - 5pm.
I will be there on Thursdays during the exhibition.

The opening is on Saturday 2nd August, 4pm - 6pm. All welcome!
This opening is an event on Facebook.

Click for Map

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body.

ACMC 2008

2008-07-21T18:19:00.008+10:00

Recently I attended the 2008 Australasian Computer Music Conference in Sydney, 10-12 July. I think this is still the only musical event in the region that combines refereed academic papers, artist talks and a festival. A real benefit of the conference is hearing talks from people whose work is then performed in the concerts. This isn't meant to be a detailed review, just a mention of some highlights for me.

The conference was held at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, which was a great venue, with the talks, concerts and so on held in rooms adjacent to central atrium of the new part of the Conservatorium. It was smoothly organised by Anthony Hood, Robert Sazdov, Ivan Zavada, Sonia Wilkie and a team of helpers. I couldn't get to everything, but I still attended about 20 talks and 6 concerts in three days. Additionally, the conference linked in with Liquid Architecture's Sydney leg, the Liquid Architecture gigs providing late-light events for ACMC. Such late-night events have become a tradition for ACMC, but this is the first time Liquid Architecture has been involved.

The keynote speakers were Robert Normandeau from Montreal and Roger Dean from Sydney. Robert is a very well-known "acousmatic" composer. He devoted a lot of his keynote speech to a detailed discussion of his piece StrinGDberg. This piece was the last one in the concerts, and was certainly a highlight of the conference.

I had to miss part of Roger Dean's talk, but the part I did hear was fascinating. It was concerned with empirical psychoacoustic studies of various musical attributes, using electro-acoustic music as test materials. It seems that almost all such work is conducted using instrumental music, and Roger saw advantages in using music less familiar to many participants.

A few other talks that struck me: Warren Burt's comparing electro-acoustic composition to Sufism (given by video,as Warren couldn't attend); Ros Bandt's on her installation Sea Lament based on sounds associated with Japanese woman abalone divers, and especially the whistling noise they make when they reach the surface; Toby Gifford and Andrew Brown's talk describing a simple but effective method for detecting percussive attacks very quickly when they are buried in other sounds; and the talk by Andrew Sorenson and Andrew Brown entitled "A compositional model for the generation of orchestral music in the German symphonic tradition". Why would one want to do this? It turns out that the generation is in real time, with obvious application to games. Instead of trying to solve completely the problem, say, of chord progression, they so far have rough and ready versions of all the main musical components. The results weren't at all bad.

From the concerts I have already mentioned Robert Normandeau's StrinGDberg. Of the other tape pieces I would mention the long and compelling piece Ombres, Espaces, Silences by Giles Gobeil, composed in stereo and ably diffused over the conference 16-channel system by Conservatorium student Henrique Dib. Remarkably, this was Henrique's first public diffusion. Also the 1969 piece Continuum, by the pioneer Tristram Cary, known for his work on Doctor Who, and a long-time resident of Adelaide, who died recently. This work held up extremely well.

Among the live performances I would mention the engaging Hands on Stage by Chi-Hsia Lai, using a small table with a translucent top, a webcam underneath, and microphones attached. The webcam interpreted shadows cast on the table as control information for sound manipulation, and additionally we saw projected a modified version of what the webcam was seeing. Another novel interface was the electronic sitar of Ajay Kapur, coupled with a head-mounted controller. The work, Anjuna's Digital Raga, was very enjoyable. Unfortunately I had to miss the workshop that Ajay gave about his work.

My favourite audio-visual work was Brigid Burke's Strings, involving complex projected images, live bass clarinet (played by Brigid), and electronically transformed sound. I also mention the strange work Po[or Symm]etry [Dra]in[s] [E]motion[s], by Mark Havriliv and Josh Dubrau. It consisted of an electronic chat session between the two performers, projected up on a screen and accompanied by sounds. But the chat messages were being transformed by a computer program, resulting in received messages looking like the title of the work.

I only engaged with two installations apart from my own Cloud Drum, Colin Black's "extended environmental guitar", which was documentation about a 15-metre long construction installed in remote locations associated with the explorer Ludwig Leichhardt, and Ros Bandt's Sea Lament mentioned above.

Of course there was a lot more. It was good to meet with old friends, but also good to see quite a few new faces. This is the sixteenth ACMC, and there seems to be plenty of energy in the community.

Installation at ACMC

2008-07-09T23:52:00.001+10:00

I have an installation called Cloud Drum at this year's Australasian Computer Music Conference in Sydney, July 10-12. It is based on the vibrations of an idealised drum, as is Triangular Vibrations, but Cloud Drum is real-time, interactive, black-and-white, and a much gentler piece.

Triangular Vibrations again

2008-07-09T23:39:00.005+10:00

Well, it won't be played at the International Computer Music Conference, but Triangular Vibrations is having a good run. As noted in an earlier post, Ivan Zavada took it on tour; also it was included in the art program that was part of the 2008 Computational Aesthetics conference in Lisbon, Portugal. Now it is being included in the Liquid Architecture Screening Reel, part of the Sydney leg of the Liquid Architecture festival, 11 and 12 July 2008.

Later: Triangular Vibrations will be screened as part of Abstracta Cinema in Rome, Italy on 23rd September, 2008.

ICMC acceptance, or not

2008-06-27T20:26:00.003+10:00

I submitted my piece Triangular Vibrations to the 2008 International Computer Music Conference, in Belfast this year. I received first a provisional acceptance, and then then a confirmed acceptance. I was very pleased about this, as I thought there would be a lot of competition.

But then it turned out that one has to attend the conference in order to have the work played. Unfortunately there was no mention of this in the call for pieces. I don't object to a policy of priority for those who can attend, but I would have liked an indication of this at the time I submitted the piece. I contacted the organisers, and was told "we could not have anticipated the volume of submissions that were made". So, it was very competitive.

I don't know what to conclude from this. Despite the Internet, Australia is still a long way away from Europe, in time and in dollars. For a little while I was making frequent overseas trips, but I couldn't sustain it, and I haven't been further than New Zealand for a while.